William Wordsworth 1770-1850

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 and grew up in the Lake District, the beautiful area of mountains, lakes and streams near the Scottish border in northwest England. The natural beauty and grandeaur of this area was a major source of inspiration for Wordsworth throughout his life. His father was an attorney. His mother died when he was eight, and William was sent to school at Hawkshead, a town further south in the Lake District. A lively though sometimes moody boy, he loved to spend his free time roaming about the countryside and getting to know the country people who lived there.

William was 13 when his father died. The considerable sum of money left to the chil­dren was withheld for some years for legal reasons, but Wordsworth was nevertheless able to attend Cambridge University in 1787. He found little in the formal university cur­riculum to interest him, however, and he longed restlessly for his summer vacations.

During the vacation of his third year at Cam­bridge, Wordsworth went on a walking tour of France and the Alps with a close friend, Robert Jones. The year was 1790, and France was celebrating the first anniversary of the Revolution. Already sympathetic to the dem­ocratic ideals that inspired the French Rev­olution, Wordsworth was filled with enthu­siastic hope that France might lead the way to a new and more just social order.

He returned to France in 1791 after com­pleting his degree at Cambridge. On this visit he became an even more fervent sup­porter of the Revolution. But lack of mon­ey forced Wordsworth to return to England.

In 1795, a friend and admirer of Words­worth’s died and left him enough money to live on while devoting himself entirely to writing poetry. With his sister Dorothy (1777-1855), to whom he was very close, Wordsworth settled in a small cottage at Racedown, Dorsetshire, in southwest Eng­land. Shortly afterward he was introduced to Samuel Taylor Coleridge*, and thus be­gan one of the most important and fruitful friendships in English literature.

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*Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772—1834) — an English poet and critic. He was one of the leaders of the Romantic movement in England.

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In 1797, Wordsworth and Dorothy moved to Alfoxdem House in Somerset, to be near Coleridge who lived only a few miles away. Already an admirer of Wordsworth’s early poetry, Coleridge convinced Wordsworth that he had far more to offer the world than he had ever dreamed. By talking and work­ing with Coleridge, Wordsworth moved be­yond his period of sadness and despair and into the greatest creative phase of his life.

The concrete result of Wordsworth’s friend­ship and collaboration with Coleridge was the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, pub­lished in 1798. This collection signaled rev­olution in English poetic theory and prac­tice and established the foundation of Eng­lish Romanticism. In 1799, almost as a kind of living confirmation of the deepest source of his poetic vision, Wordsworth returned with Dorothy to their native Lake District and settled at Grasmere, in a small house later known as Dove Cottage. They would continue to live in this area for the rest of their lives.

Coleridge followed them and rented a house at Keswick, 13 miles away. In 1800, they published a second edition of Lyrical Bal­lads, which contained Wordsworth’s pref­ace and a new volume of poems, including the famous Lucy Poems, many of which were written during a long and somber visit to Germany in the winter of 1798-1799.

In 1802, Wordsworth finally inherited the money left him by his father and married a childhood friend from the Lake District, Mary Hutchinson. But the years that fol­lowed, although they saw the full matura­tion of Wordsworth’s powers as a poet, were filled with personal disaster. In 1805, his favourite brother John, a ship captain, was drowned at sea. The event is reflected in the “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Pic­ture of Peele Castle”, one of the finest po­ems to appear in Poems in Two Volumes, published in 1807. In 1810, the friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, which for varioue reasons had gradually become more cool and distant, was broken by an open quarrel. It was many tears before the two men were reconciled. Two years later tragedy struck again — two of this chil­dren died offering the sadness of these mid­dle years, however, was the steady growth of Wordswoeth’s reputation as a poet. In 1805, he accepted a government job as revenue collector for the county of West­morland, a sign not only of the national esteem he had won, but also of the growing conservatism of his political views. In 1843, at age 73, he was made poet laureate*.

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*poet laureate — formal title used in both Britain and the United States. In Britain, the poet laureate is named by the sovereign as a member of the royal household and is charged with the preparation of suitable verses for court and state occasions.

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Many of Wordsworth’s verses admirers, both contemporary and modern, have seen a lamentable decline of Wordsworth’s poet­ic powers after the decade of 1797-1807. And it is true that most of Wordsworth’s finest poems were already included in Lyri­cal Ballads and in Poems in Two Volumes. In any case, Wordsworth continued to write poems, some of which give confidence of his work at its best, until his death in 1850, at the age of 80.

Only after his death, Wordsworth’s mas­terpiece, The Prelude, was published. In 1798, he had begun work on this monumen­tal autobiographical poem, and in 1805, he completed a first version of it. But Words­worth continued to revise The Prelude for the rest of his life.

In his poems Wordsworth aimed at simplic­ity and purity of the language. Every ob­ject in nature was in his eyes a source of poetry — a thorn on a hillside, children gathering flowers on the banks of a stream, the notes of the cuckoo and the shadows of the failing leaves. For him there was a poem in every glen, a romance in every ruined castle. The poet was a passionate lover of nature and his descriptions of lakes and riv­ers, of meadows and woods, of skies and clouds are exquisite. A great innovator, Wordsworth permanently enlarges the range of English poetry both in subject matter and in treatment (a distinction he would not himself have accepted).